Chuck Sweeny: Thanks, FCC, but I'll decide what I need to know

Saturday

Feb 22, 2014 at 8:00 AM

Once again, the government is at the door and wants to come on in to help. This time it's the Federal Communications Commission, which wants to make sure we're getting the right kind of news, which we will need to be correctly informed citizens.

The FCC hired a consultant, Social Solutions International, to do this study to help the media achieve, in my opinion, pure political correctness.

Social Solutions will study the content of a week's worth of TV, radio, newspaper and Internet news content in various media markets, starting with Columbia, S.C., this spring. The study will determine whether the local media are serving various groups of people properly, whether they ignore some groups or present some groups in a negative light. Is there a perceived bias? Surveyors will ask people in the neighborhoods whether they think the media are, you might say, offering the right kinds of news and views in eight content areas, like health, transportation and so forth.

The FCC, now under the control of President Vladimir ... oops, wrong country! Anyway, the FCC says it is going to ask newsrooms to "voluntarily" fill out surveys. They're going to ask reporters if any of their stories have been spiked by management.

This is the same outfit that licenses over-the-air stations every eight years. But the FCC has no control over newspapers, so I wonder why they're surveying newspaper content?

This survey will have a chilling effect on news gatherers throughout the country. It not only is anti-democratic, it's an infringement on the First Amendment's guarantee that government can't interfere with freedom of speech and of the press.

A dissident FCC commissioner, Ajit Pai, hopes to block this study. In a Wall Street Journal column last week, Pai questioned how the FCC could determine what people need to know:

"News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch."

Pai believes that this study is an attempt to create a new kind of Fairness Doctrine, which from 1949 to 1987 required radio and TV stations to give equal time to all sides of an issue. The doctrine effectively stifled politically partisan speech on the airwaves.

From the earliest days of the 13 colonies, a free press has been our hallmark. "Broadsides" made up the Internet of the 1700s. These single sheets of paper, pasted to walls and bulletin boards and pinned up in taverns, churches and government buildings, were as freewheeling as anything you'll see on Twitter or Facebook.

They told the stories of unrest, called people to meetings, protested unfair taxation and, finally, called men to arms in rebellion against British rule. Would the Revolution have occurred without broadsides? The most famous of them all was the Declaration of Independence. It hurt the king's feelings and was certainly insensitive. It had a perceived bias. Did we need to know this?

William Lloyd Garrison took full advantage of press freedom, publishing the radical anti-slavery newspaper "The Liberator" for more than 30 years starting in 1831.

"Come what may - cost what it may - inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the breeze, as your religious and political motto - No compromise with slavery! No union with slaveholders," Garrison wrote. What if he'd been muzzled because the government thought he had a perceived bias against southern states where slavery was the law of the land?

Commissioner Pai concluded his column by saying people make their own judgments about what they need to know:

"Should all stations follow MSNBC's example and cut away from a discussion with a former congresswoman about the National Security Agency's collection of phone records to offer live coverage of Justin Bieber's bond hearing? As a consumer of news, I have an opinion. But my opinion shouldn't matter more than anyone else's merely because I happen to work at the FCC."